THE CSHL ARCHIVES BLOG

About the Library and Archives

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives is located in Cold Spring Harbor, NY on the North Shore of Long Island. It is home to Genentech Center for the History of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, and houses the collections of Nobel Prize winners James D. Watson, Sydney Brenner, Barbara McClintock, and Alfred D. Hershey.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Ludmila Pollock

Read a letter from the executive director of the CSHL Library and Archives.

The
following is another post in our series highlighting the collections
that are being processed through the NHPRC Basic Processing Grant.

Witkin and A.H. Sparrow at the 1947 CSH Symposium

Evelyn M. Witkin is an American geneticist whose research
has been widely influential in the areas of DNA mutagenesis and DNA repair.

The Evelyn Witkin Collection at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory consists of three series including Dr. Witkin’s professional
correspondence with Nobelist Barbara McClintock, Joshua Lederberg, and Ruth
Sager among others. There is a complete collection of her personal reprints as
well as historical documents related to her work on the “SOS Response”.

Witkin’s connection
to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is through her work at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics where she was a staff scientist
from 1945 until 1955. During her time at the Department of Genetics, she
isolated a UV radiation-resistant mutant of E.
coli, the first time this work had been done.

The
following is another post in our series highlighting the collections
that are being processed through the NHPRC Basic Processing Grant.

The
Office of Technology Transfer Collection documents CSHL’s first inroads into
the world of Biotechnology. Research
that was initially carried out in academic laboratories led to the development
of recombinant DNA techniques. This in
turn stimulated entrepreneurial scientists to create biotechnology companies.
Recombinant DNA is the technology that allows us to insert genes from one
organism into another to make it produce a protein product, copy the gene
multiple times, or give it a new trait. The discovery of recombinant DNA was
considered the "birth" of modern biotechnology.

CSHL
has always been on the forefront of scientific research and discoveries. Thus, it was a natural progression that the
Lab should move into biotechnology. Here we will show a brief overview of three
early forays.

1.Cellbiology Corporation, a
biotechnology company established in 1980, was a wholly owned for-profit
subsidiary of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It was originally conceived as the
commercial arm of the Lab and as an entity that would initiate CSHL into the
biotech world and harness the developments in gene splicing and recombinant DNA
techniques. Cellbiology was used for a
few projects in the early-to-mid 1980s, but it never developed into a long-term
concern. The most significant work
occured in 1982: Cellbiology Corporation signed a contract with Baxter
Travenol, "covering the development of Tissue Plasminogen Activator (tPA)
as a potentially useful pharmaceutical product to dissolve blood
clots." Together, the two
companies contracted to work with the Genetics Institute in Boston on the Activator. In July 1984, Baxter Travenol sold its
interests in tPA technology to Burroughs Wellcome. Cellbiology Corporation was
kept mostly dormant from the mid-1980s on, and it was dissolved in 1995.

Dr.
Harlow in 1986 with URP student Abhjeet Lele

2.Ed Harlow: In 1988, while working at CSHL, Ed
Harlow and his colleagues established "a crucial functional link
between the two general classes of cancer-causing genes (oncogenes and
tumor-suppressor genes)". Oncogenes (tumor inducing genes) induce changes in cell
phenotype. Adenovirus oncogene E1A can
immortalize primary cells and can also cooperate with the adenovirus E1B gene
or other oncogene to transform cells in culture. The transformed cells will induce tumors in
animals. E1A encoded proteins are potent
regulators of gene expression able to modulate transcription of both viral and
cellular genes. E1A proteins activate
transcription of the other adenovirus early genes and certain cellular
genes. They also repress transcription
of genes linked to certain viral or cellular enhancers.

In addition to his work
on oncogens, while at CSHL, Dr. Harlow and Nick Dyson worked under a
relationship between CSHL and Amersham on monoclonal antibodies. Dr. Harlow left CSHL in February of 1991 to
become scientific director at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

3.ICOS Corp. was founded in early 1990 as
a Seattle-based drug discovery company specializing in inflammatory
diseases. ICOS was founded by three men: George Rathmann, founder of Amgen;
Robert Nowinski, founder of Genetic Systems Corporation; and Christopher
Henney, founder of Immunex Corporation.

The formal relationship
between CSHL and ICOS began in April 1990 with a licensing agreement under
which ICOS was obligated to pay CSHL royalties for all PDE [phosphodiesterase]
products developed by ICOS that used Michael Wigler's patented techniques. ICOS eventually developed the popular drug
Cialis from Dr. Wigler's technology. This portion of the Collection is restricted
due to confidentiality obligations between ICOS and CSHL.

Here is a photo of the early scientists and administrators involved
with ICOS, circa 1990.

Today is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's famous paper on the structure of DNA. The CSHL Archives is home to the James D. Watson Collection, which includes many documents related to the discovery. Below is just a selection of items found in the collection, all of which are accessible via our online repository.

Andre Lwoff, Jacques Monod, and Francois Jacob win the Nobel Prize in 1965. Courtesy of the James D. Watson Collection.

Last Friday famed molecular biologist Francois Jacob passed away. Jacob, along with Andrew Lwoff and Jacques Monod, was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for identifying messenger RNA and their work on gene regulation. This research was conducted during the golden age of molecular biology--the period from the late 1940s until the early 1960s when our understanding of genetics grew leaps and bounds. Jacob described the tight-knit community of scientists at the time in an oral history interview for Web of Stories:

"There were 15 or 20 guys, always the same ones [at scientific meetings]. Roughly there were Delbrück's guys- there was the Delbrück-Luria group,
Jim [Watson] who came from it because he was Luria's student. In England there
was Crick and Sydney [Brenner]. And there was us here. And that's it."

The
CSHL Library & Archives holds a number of letters between Jacob,
Watson, Brenner, Crick, and others, which illustrate the community and
friendship which existed among many of the major scientists of the era.

The letter above is from Francois Jacob to Matthew Meselson. The two, along with Sydney Brenner, conducted a famous experiment at Caltech which showed that RNA was a copy of the information in DNA. The RNA acts as a messenger, transporting the information from the nucleus to the protein-making machinery in the cell. As the letter indicates, Watson and Francois Gros were also working on RNA at the time.For more letters and photographs related to Francois Jacob please visit our online repository.

About Me

I am the James D. Watson Archivist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library & Archives. In addition to working on Dr. Watson's collection, I also manage the digitization of both Watson's and Sydney Brenner's collections as part of the Wellcome Library’s "Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" project.